Kristen Craft: Using Video to do Better Marketing

Thanks, Shavan. Hey, everyone. So good to be here. So lovely to see all of your faces. Big applause for the folks at HubSpot for putting on such a great event. It's always such a fun time. So I want to start off with a little bit of a story. And for this story, I want to take us back to the 80s. This was me in the 80s. I don't really know what I was doing with this, like, large hair and large teeth situation. Thank God for braces, I guess. But, you know, as a kid in the 80s, like many kids, I spent a ton of time driving around in the car with my parents, like going on errands, going to the grocery store. And I remember so clearly what it was like driving around in the car with my dad because his car was always pretty clean. He always had like a hidden stash of peanut M and Ms. Somewhere in the car that you could find. But one of the really memorable and sort of funny things about being in the car with him was a device he had there. Now, some of you might not remember this, but others might recall the car phone. This was not a mobile phone. This was a car phone in that it was affixed to the center console of the car and it was this big honking thing. Like this picture kind of doesn't do justice to just how large these phones were, but there were these big honking phones. And so often I would be in the car with my dad and he would get a phone call from someone and he would start talking and he would be asking about their kids and he would remember their kids and names or he would remember where they had been on vacation recently and he would ask them how that vacation had been. And at some point as I was growing up, I learned, you know, I'd always assumed he was talking to a buddy, but at some point I learned that he was actually talking to his clients. You know, my dad was a sales guy and this like, to my child brain just did not make sense. Like, first of all, why are you wasting your time talking to existing clients? Like, aren't sales people just supposed to be like, dialing and selling people? But. But the second thing that puzzled me a little bit was why did he know their kids names? Why did he know where they were on vacation? Why did he bother? And what he has explained to me over the years is his philosophy on sales. And I think this kind of extends to marketing as well, which is that it's much easier and in a lot of ways better to retain an existing customer than it is to try to bring in a new customer. So, you know, why am I telling you this story? Well, you know, I think at the end of the day, although times have changed, technology has changed, we still want the same things that my dad wanted back in the 80s. We all want lifelong customers who are going to stick with us and love us and tell other people about our company or our product or our service. And yet I think we've kind of lost sight of this over time. I mean, yeah, there are a lot of solutions and technologies that make our lives easier, make it easier to scale communication. And I get it, it's not really possible to be on the phone every day with all of your customers and remember all of their kids names. Like that's a very hard to scale thing. But the end of the day, we still want the same thing. And I believe that there are ways actually that we can scale this, scale what my dad was doing, for example, in an efficient way. So, you know, we all want these lifelong customers and yet that doesn't happen. You know, we're working so hard to market well and to build great products, but people still churn. And you know, I think that's because oftentimes we are using short term tactics and short term tactics, like, you know, random price cuts or you know, some sort of special promotion that you're running, those kinds of short term tactics lead to short term relationships. And remember, that's not what we want. We want these lifelong customers. So what does it take to actually keep these people around for life and get them evangelizing on your behalf? I tend to think that there are three main ways that we can differentiate ourselves and our companies. We can differentiate on product, on price and on experience. Let's talk about all these for a second. Differentiating on price. This is where a lot of companies start out or a lot of people gravitate towards. Because in a lot of ways it's pretty easy. I think it's sort of, it seems intuitive that if you have the lowest price, people will come to you. But in fact, a large majority of people say that they're happy to pay more if they are getting a better experience. I mean, I know like I will pay more to fly on JetBlue versus Spirit Airlines because I like that experience better. So I would contend that price is not the answer here. Let's talk about product for a sec. I think it's pretty easy to think that someone's going to come and steal your customers away if they can just replicate the product experience that you have. Let's just add on one more feature. We'll just layer one more thing on top, and then we'll have the best solution. We'll have the solution that nobody else can check the box on all those things. Well, I think actually customers don't necessarily want this huge laundry list of features and feature sets. And that's because of something called Hick's Law. Turns out that actually the complexity of the solution leads to a worse experience as you layer on more features, more options, more choices. The kind of experience that people have goes down over time. So just layering on more features and trying to always be, you know, keeping up with the Joneses from a product perspective is not necessarily the answer. Sometimes simple elegance is what you should be shooting for. So where does that leave us? Experience. I think that experience truly is the ultimate differentiator. This is something that nobody else can steal from you. Nobody else can replicate what it feels like to work with you. Nobody can undercut that. And the reason I'm talking about all of this is because video is a great, great way to actually extend the experience of what it's like with working with you to, you know, dozens, hundreds, thousands of customers. You know, my dad can't necessarily get on the phone with all of these people and know their kids names, but if my dad were still, you know, out there working in sales, he could give people more of a taste of who he is. And it's what it's like to work with him, what that experience feels like through video. So I want to get tactical for a sec, and there are three main areas that we're going to dig into today. First of all, how can you actually use video strategically to do these things? How can you scale the experience of what it's like to work with you so that you do win and retain lifelong customers? Second of all, if you are already doing video, if you're getting started, what metrics do you watch? Because I assure you it goes way beyond. It should go way beyond play count. And then last, I want to talk about how people are are currently using Wistia and HubSpot together to scale this experience really, really intelligently and strategically to drive revenue, to drive leads for their businesses. All right, so as a counterpoint, I want to start with something that the vast majority of people are doing with video right now. And so the sort of, like, side note is if you are not doing this, you can win. You can differentiate yourself because so many people are doing it foolishly. People are currently, for the most part, using what I call the slap it on strategy. They make a video and then they're like, oh, where do I put this now? And so they just slap it somewhere on their website and they don't look back. They don't really pay attention to whether that video does belong there. They don't really pay attention to what the goal of the video was in the first place. Nor do they check any sort of metrics to find out if it's achieving that goal or bringing them closer to that goal. So, you know, again, the downsides of this are threefold. You have no sort of feedback loop that tells you whether that video is working. Therefore, you don't have the ability to improve on it over time. And last, and I would say this is probably the biggest part, because video is a workhorse. You're not actually using that video to get some of the things that you probably care a lot about. I mean, you're a savvy audience. Like the people who come to Inbound are savvy, savvy marketers and business owners. So I kind of take it as a given that most folks here understand the value of leads and conversions. But when it comes to video, most people aren't necessarily putting those two things together. So what does the alternative look like? I would argue that instead it's important to start with your overarching your company goal or your goal for your products or for your marketing team. This might be a lot of different things and probably different teams are focused on different things at different times. So we're actually going to touch on a few different angles of goals that video can help you accomplish. I would encourage all of you don't necessarily need to do this right now, but to sit down and actually map this out on paper. I'm such a nerd about pencil and paper or pen and paper, but really do this and actually map what these things, what your goals are so you can start mapping different video types to those specific goals. And I want to give you an example of what I mean here. So let's take traffic boosting video. If you are a marketer and one of your KPIs that you are focused on is the traffic you're getting to your website or your landing page or whatever campaign you're running, there are different kinds of videos that can help you get there and that give you sort of an outsized impact in terms of getting you there. Social video is really helpful. Video is the most retweeted kind of content on Twitter. So if you are putting, you know, little video pieces you know, content out there on Twitter that's going to help bring people to your website to a really high degree. Recorded webinars also, I think in a lot of ways recorded webinars are sort of the unsung hero of the video world. I talk with a lot of companies who are like, oh no, we're not doing video yet. I mean, we do webinars, but like, we're not doing video that is actually video. And if you are recording that webinar, you can then use that asset to bring people to your website and keep people engaged. So webinars, recorded webinars can really help in terms of getting more people to your website and keeping them there and keeping them learning. All right, let's change gears and talk about engagement. So you've brought people to your website, that's awesome. Now you want to keep them learning, keep them interested. You want to reduce your bounce rate and your exit rate. Again, recorded webinars are really good for this because oftentimes they're teaching something really tactical and you're actually able to show, not just tell people how to do something. Blog videos are excellent as well. We've done a lot of research around how a blog post with video performs versus a blog post without video. People tend to spend at least two times as much time on page when the blog post contains a video. And then last video testimonials, you know, if you want to keep people there thinking about buying from you. Video testimonials are a really good way of giving people the opportunity to envision what it feels like to actually work with you. You know, to envision what that experience is like that you can give them if lead gen is your goal. Again, recorded webinars, they are just perceived as a really like hefty kind of content that people are often pretty willing to trade their email address for because they learning something of value. Any sort of inbound content, you know, this might be, you know, it might be simply a blog post. It might also be a digital ebook, it might be a microsite event. Videos are actually really excellent as well for lead gen. So if any of you are feeling really ambitious, you could take some video like interview various attendees or speakers here at Inbound and then post that on your sites with a gate in front of it so you can collect email addresses. We'll talk in a minute about how you can actually do that really well if sales is your goal. Product videos are remarkably effective. Here again, I think about my 6th grade English teacher who always said, kristen, show don't tell. This is exactly what product videos do. I mean, nothing can actually give people a feel for what your product is like better than letting them actually see it in action. Video testimonials, again, like, this allows somebody to sort of envision what it's like to be a customer of yours. And I think especially if you have a nice variety of video testimonials from different verticals, let's say, that allows someone to say, like, oh, you know, this company is just like me. They were struggling with some of the same things I struggle with, as well as sales videos. Sales videos are sort of a new thing. But we're actually seeing a lot of questions, a lot of marketing agencies doing more of this. And I'll share an example from an agency called Blue Leads. I know they're also a HubSpot partner agency. Whenever Blue Leads, which is a marketing agency, meets with a client, sorry, a prospective client, they will then follow up with a video saying like, hey, you know, James, I love chatting with you. You know, I wanted to give you a feel for the team you'd be working with if you come on board. Like, this is our art director, this is our marketing manager. We, we hope you'll join us. They have found that they're closing deals at a roughly 50% higher rate because of these sales videos they're sending out. And it takes them like 10 minutes to shoot. And then last, brand building, you know, if you care about getting the word out and building brand equity, Social video works really, really well again because it is highly shareable on Twitter. Also, not that many people are leveraging this very well yet. So you just sort of have an opportunity to be an early mover and then blog videos as well. You know, if you are taking the time to write a blog post, why not preface it with like a 15 second video, you know, from the author saying like, here's why I wrote this blog post. Here's why I think this matters. You know, I think just getting that kind of personal, you know, angle to a blog post helps people understand like why they should care. Okay, so that is all about goal mapping and sort of figuring out what your specific goals are, which ones you want to focus on your right now and then which videos are the best fit for you rather than just going out and sort of like making a video. But I want to give you a few examples here of videos that I think do some of these things particularly well. So first I want to show you an example of a traffic video and I guess I just want to Preface this with something. The quality of this video is not, like, super high. I think this was a. A group of, like, fairly novice people who made this video. But I actually think that's a really cool and powerful thing to see. So the idea here, basically this guy Scott is just teaching people about, I think, installing a filter. Chris. All right, well, I will tell you what's happening here. He basically is saying, like, hey, you want to install a filter on your filtration system? Here's how you do it. Like, you take it, you double check that the seal is all correct, and then you're going to be putting it in your machine. And as I said, if you could hear the audio, it's probably better that you're not hearing the audio because it's really shoddy. The audio is not great. This guy, he's not an actor. He is an actual person who works for HI Pro that installs these filters. He's an expert.

It seems real simple to draw a bottle sample. But what we want to eliminate, if we're talking about very efficient filtration and a very clean system, the trend analysis in the lab report. It's critical to get the bottle sampled correctly and not have background contamination from either the bottle, the cap, or even the sample valve. So this is how you can make it real simple to get a good test and you can believe your lab report for good trend analysis.

Okay, so as I said, the quality of this is like nothing to write home about. But this video has worked remarkably well for this company. So I want to give you a look at the stats from this video. First of all, they did not have great traffic to their blog beforehand. This has actually worked wonders to building traffic and generating traffic from customers, but also from prospective customers, even just people who happen to work in the same industry who go on to sort of evangelize about the work that they're doing. Like, oh, you want to do that thing? There's this great video that you can check out that shows you exactly what you need to do to install this. This new system. So, first of all, it's really helped them from a traffic perspective. But also what I think is cool here is just the sort of engagement level and number of plays. Like, this has gotten over a thousand plays, which is cool to see for something that's so specific and esoteric. So what does success look like? Just to go back here again, we have this high play rate. That's certainly a win. The engagement rate is really high. So as you see up there, 60% average engagement that Means that on average, all of the people who viewed this video, across all those people, they stuck around on average for 60% of this video, which is quite high for a three minute video. Like that is not something that's too typical to see. That's certainly a win. And then the sheer number of plays as well. And I guess just to clarify one point, there is a distinction here, and it's an important distinction. The number of plays is like what all of us think about when we, you know, if you look at like YouTube, it's a good thing, like you want to get plays. But also in the industry, we sometimes refer to this as a vanity metric because, like, it feels really great to know that you got a lot of plays. But were these the right people? Did they actually stick around or did they hit play and they leave after five seconds? It really only skims the surface of how your video is playing, performing. So instead I tend to care a bit more about play. Rate that 72%. That means of the people who arrived on the page where this video lives, what percentage of them chose to click play? And this is often sort of a reflection of how good your video thumbnail image is. You know, what is the title that is above the video? Like, what sort of context are you giving people about what they get? So, you know, I think this is a pretty successful video for this company because they are getting people, they're keeping people. You know, just anecdotally talking with the agency who works with them. They were very, very happy about this video's performance. This really helped them from a traffic perspective. All right, let's talk about the lead gen video. So again, remember, this is the kind of video that you are using in hopes of generating new leads from prospects that you can eventually close and turn into customers. So this example comes from an organization called SpinWeb. They are a marketing agency and they found that a ton of people were coming to them saying, like, you know, I don't, I'm not an editor, but I really want to use images and I want to manipulate those images. Can you just give me some basic guidance about what we can do here? So this guy Jason, who is a designer himself, put together sort of like quick and dirty guide to manipulating photos.

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